Tag: Game Tech

Zen and the Houdini Text Editor

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houdinifxSplash.jpg

A career ago, I was a Senior Houdini Artist and Senior Creative Consultant for Side Effects Software, makers of the the amazing DCC package, Houdini.   Houdini allows you to do all kinds of amazing stuff, and a quick Youtube or Vimeo search will reveal the mindblowing works of talented artists who have picked up this oddball workflow and run with it at the speed of light, proving that it’s not just for FX pipeline nerds anymore.  There’s also a lot of stuff that may not look great, but don’t let that put you off: people are sharing their learning … Read the rest

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Threads and Cores.

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Eventually, I’ll need to upgrade my dev workstation from the 4-core Intel Core i5 I have now to something a little speedier and beefier. Unreal Engine 4 likes to recompile its shader library often enough that it slows me down, and building for multiple platforms can take its toll as well.

I think I’m going to go AMD this round, probably a 12 or 16 core Threadripper, and in my poking around, I found this article by Sebastian Aaltonen, founder of Second Order Games and formerly a lead rendering engineer at Ubisoft.

Lots of solid advice and test results in … Read the rest

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Portals and Planes

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Got to grips with the Magic Kit.  Magic Leap was kind enough to set up some very thorough tutorials with a lot of helpers to let you do baby steps on accessing, using, and showing the capabilities of the device, so I cribbed a bunch of stuff related to plane detection, gestures, and interactivity.  

This has mostly been a bit of a wander.  Initially I wanted to port a janky Hololens demo to Magic Leap, but I soon realized that a straight port wasn’t going to happen without some basic understanding of how things work.  I wanted to understand and … Read the rest

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